Take 2. FRIDAY'S GUIDE TO MOVIES & MUSIC. Movie review.

Techno-thriller `Virtuosity' Packed With Virtual Nonsense

August 04, 1995|By Michael Wilmington, Tribune movie critic.

Does "Virtuosity"--a movie full of gaudy graphics, virtual-reality villains and computer-generated sex and bloodbaths--represent the moviemaking wave of the future? And if it does, can we switch to some other parallel universe and avoid it?

Watching this sci-fi thriller, with Denzel Washington as a brooding former Los Angeles cop chasing android killer Sid 6.7 (Russell Crowe) through a futuristic computerized L.A., is a numbing experience. Packed with flashy effects and carnage, cookie-cutter characters and dumb plot twists, the movie wears you out. Seeing it is like watching a mud-wrestling match between robots before a crowd of zombies.

In the movie, Crowe's Sid 6.7 is a cyberspace villain programmed with 183 criminal minds--including, it seems, Hitler's, John Gacy's and Charles Manson's--used to train police manhunters in a virtual-reality hookup. For reasons best known to writer Eric Bernt and director Brett Leonard, the LAPD chooses for testing not a regular cop but an ex-cop serving a murder sentence, Washington's Parker Barnes.

"Virtuosity's" first sequence is a visual dazzler, with Barnes tracking Sid through a surreal cityscape full of gray-suited corporate clones. But then the plot--virtual nonsense--begins to kick in, and the dazzlement loses its grip.

Eventually, when Sid escapes into the real world through the machinations of his inventor, warped software genius Daryl Lindenmeyer (Stephen Spinella), the movie floats right off into Loony La-La-Land.

Barnes is designated as the man to track Sid down--and promised a pardon by government anti-crime czar Elizabeth Deane (Louise Fletcher) if he does the job. But it's no easy task. Sid, who looks, acts and dresses like a yuppie psychopath, also bleeds blue "nanotech" blood and automatically heals himself whenever he's shot. Filled with energy, he runs around L.A. killing wantonly, smirking, giggling and making bad jokes.

Sid is like his ancestors, the Golem or Frankenstein's monster. You just turn him on and he runs amok. There's really no reason for him to kill, other than boredom or the chance to rile Parker Barnes. But perhaps he aspires to be an artist of massacre (like the moviemakers themselves). In one ludicrous scene, Sid holds an entire disco full of people at gunpoint and conducts them in a symphony of screams.

There's also not much reason for Parker to keep chasing and shooting at this snickering techno-heavy, since every time a bullet hits Sid, he just bleeds blue gunk and heals himself.

Yet Parker never stops--not even when he gets framed for another murder and the rest of L.A.'s cops start chasing him. If Parker uses up a round or two on Sid in one scene, he'll be back a while later, blasting away. And though it's established that Parker and Sid have a vendetta going--that one of Sid's 183 minds belongs to a maniacal anti-democracy terrorist named Grimes who wiped out Parker's family--it's hard to guess why the cop keeps wasting ammunition. Shouldn't he try something different, like a shark-net?

Russell Crowe--the Australian-New Zealander actor who starred in "Romper Stomper" and "Proof"--plays Sid with an infuriating set of cocky smirks. Washington fights back with a lot of glowers, though he does smile at one little girl--who, of course, gets kidnapped. These two excellent actors no more deserve to be in a movie like this than Michael Jordan might deserve to be hustling hopscotch games for a living in Wicker Park. As for everyone else in the cast--including Kelly Lynch and Bill Forsythe--the best thing you can say is that they all say their lines with a straight face. It can't have been easy.

The usual bad movie sometimes gives a few chuckles, amuses audiences by making them feel superior. But young director Leonard makes a different kind of bomb. Fascinated with technology--and especially with the virtual reality that was the centerpiece of his first movie, "The Lawnmower Man"--Leonard makes cutting-edge techno-turkeys, with wildly elaborate visuals and ridiculous plots.

"Virtuosity" is supposed to be taking place in the future. But, since it's set in 1999, these moviemakers seem wildly optimistic. Do they really expect L.A. to have either androids or a train system by then? They might as well wait around for a Hollywood techno-thriller that makes sense--which may be as useless an occupation as trying to shoot Sid 6.7.